by Joan Didion
“Don’t you want it to be all right?”
He did not say anything.
She swallowed half the bourbon in her glass. “Everett. Listen to me. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to go to prison. You’re going to go to Alcatraz and maybe die if you don’t start listening to me.”
“San Quentin. Not Alcatraz. San Quentin.”
“Everett.”
He looked at her. He had been wrong about her down on the dock: she was no older, she was still the thin little girl with the safety pin in her sunglasses, and whatever had happened in the years between did not signify much. Channing did not signify much: he thought of Channing sitting there on the log smoking a cigarette, switching his flashlight toward the levee and calling Lily? then springing up and flipping his cigarette into the water when he saw that it was not Lily. (You better get off, Channing, you better get off this property, he had said, and Channing had laughed: O.K., Coop, O.K. He had imagined Channing maybe telling Lily, later, what had happened, imagined Lily laughing with him. O.K., Coop, Channing had said, you’re going to hurt somebody with that, and she’s no good to you dead.) None of it signified: whether Channing had tried to grab the gun to protect himself or because he thought Everett intended to shoot Lily; whether he had shot Channing because he had intended to all along or because he was angered by Channing’s thinking he could hurt Lily; none of it mattered. Channing pitching forward over the log, his flashlight rolling into the water: they were events of equal importance. After a while it had all been quiet again and he had wondered how the shot could have been so accurate when he could not remember aiming.
He smoothed the hair back from Lily’s face.
“Anyway,” he said, trying to make her smile. “We call it Quentin. Or just plain ‘Q.’ ”
“Everett.” She buried her face in his sleeve.
“Never mind. Don’t worry.”
“Listen.” She looked up at him. “You wouldn’t do it now.”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
“Then it doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does.” He got up and walked over to the window.
“The swimming-pool lights are on again,” he said. It suddenly irritated him: the pool lights left on when they were all at a party, the dock light burned out and not replaced, the waste everywhere, waste and erosion. “There’s no reason to have the lights on when nobody’s home.”
“Julie thinks they’re beautiful,” Lily said faintly. “I left them on for Julie.”
“Julie’s not home,” he said reasonably. “We can burn them all day and all night if Julie thinks they’re beautiful, but Julie has not been home all evening.”
“Everett. Please.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just a minute.”
“Sit down and listen to me.”
He opened and closed the screen door, examined the hinges absently, picked up his drink and finished it.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m going to call McGrath now.”
She sat forward on the edge of the couch. “You’re going to tell him what we planned? Everett?”
“Sure. Sure, baby.”
“Let me call.”
He closed the telephone book and dialed.
“Ed? Everett McClellan.”
Lily crossed the room and sat down by the telephone looking up at him.
“That’s right,” he said. “Once before. I called you in the middle of the night once before. Ten years ago.”
“You know Ryder Channing? That’s right. No, they’re divorced.” He paused. “Listen. I shot him.”
“Tell him why,” Lily whispered.
“I just shot him. We had a fight over a gun and I shot him. My gun. You get on over here and I’ll tell you about it.”
Everett hung up.
“You didn’t tell him why.”
“No,” Everett said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He took Lily’s hand.
“Lily. Lily baby.”
She did not take her eyes from him.
“I’m going down to get the gun,” he said.
“Leave the gun. Wait until McGrath comes.”
He shook his head.
“Leave me be,” he said gently. “You sit here.”
Holding her, her head pressed against his chest, he felt the sobs beginning in her frame and knew that she realized it was not going to be the way she had wanted it.
“Wait for the children,” she said. “Julie will be here.”
“I don’t want to see her.”
“Everett—”
“It was all right,” he whispered. “It’s been all right.”
“I love you.”
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that.”
“Nobody would have known it,” she said. “Nobody. The way it’s been.”
“Known what.”
“That I loved you.”
“I knew it. You knew it.”
She clung to him. He could feel her ribs beneath her dress.
“Listen,” he said. “You have to put on some weight. You have to start eating more and getting some rest. You promise.”
“I promise.”
“All right then.” He kissed her closed eyes.
26
Sitting on the needlepoint chair where Everett had told her to sit she felt her hands wet, her head hurting (hurting, not aching; it had stopped aching upstairs, an hour ago, when she had first heard the shot), nothing very real. The only real thing had been the shot and she could hear it still, cracking reflexively through all the years before, spinning through the darkness between the games they had all played as children and the games they played now, between the child she had been and whoever she was now, sitting on the needlepoint chair and knowing that he was not going to let her make it all right.
Leave me be. What had it all been about: all the manqué promises, the failures of love and faith and honor; Martha buried out there by the levee in a $250 dress from Magnin’s with river silt in the seams; Sarah in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; her father, who had not much cared, the easy loser (He never could have been, her mother had said and still loved him); her mother sitting alone this afternoon in the big house upriver writing out invitations for the Admission Day Fiesta and watching Dick Clark’s American Bandstand because the Dodgers were rained out; Everett down there on the dock with his father’s .38. She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother’s dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.
Leave him be. It was all she could do now, the only present she could make him. Drive far away our ghostly foe and thine abiding peace bestow. Christ on the cross couldn’t drive away that ghostly foe. And maybe once you realized you had to do it alone, you were on your way home. Maybe the most difficult, most important thing anyone could do for anyone else was to leave him alone; it was perhaps the only gratuitous act, the act of love.
She sat on the needlepoint chair until she heard it, the second shot. When she found him, face down with his arm flung out and his
head hanging over the edge of the dock, she lay down beside him on the wet boards and talked to him, telling him things for which there had never been any other words: Remember, Everett baby once at the Fair, you lifted me onto the golden bear in front of the Counties Building and kissed me and we laughed. And remember we used to lie in bed mornings, sometimes with Knight in bed between us and I would say don’t go to sleep, he’ll smother, remember how it was and remember the day we took the children to the Cosumnes and it rained and we all sat drinking Cokes under the cottonwood and the rain coming through remember Everett baby remember. She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much.
As she lay holding him against the dark she heard the sirens on the highway, but did not move until the two cars, one McGrath’s and one the Highway Patrol, swung off the levee and down the drive to the house. She stood up then, left Everett and climbed the wooden stairs to the road. In the light down on the verandah McGrath, his pants pulled on with a pajama top, stood with two other men; another man, in a Highway Patrol uniform, waited on the lawn, looking not at the house but at the lighted pool. Watching them as she brushed the leaves from her skirt and licked the blood from the arm she had held around Everett, she began to wonder what she would say, not to them but to Knight and to Julie. She did not know what she could tell anyone except that he had been a good man. She was not certain that he had been but it was what she would have wished for him, if they gave her one wish.
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.
BOOKS BY JOAN DIDION
WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
WHERE I WAS FROM
POLITICAL FICTIONS
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
AFTER HENRY
MIAMI
DEMOCRACY
SALVADOR
THE WHITE ALBUM
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
RUN RIVER
ALSO BY JOAN DIDION
AFTER HENRY
In After Henry, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.
Current Affairs/Essays/978-0-679-74539-6
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness that has made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. Charlotte Douglas has come to the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75486-2
DEMOCRACY
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of the losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget Inez’s father is a murderer. Moving deftly between romance, farce and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75485-5
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena’s father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal—a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75285-1
MIAMI
No one has observed Miami’s pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami’s drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy—and of political violence turned as personal as a family feud.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-78180-6
POLITICAL FICTIONS
In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
Essays/Political/978-0-375-71890-8
RUN RIVER
Joan Didion’s electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75250-9
SALVADOR
“Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As she travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-75183-0
WHERE I WAS FROM
In this moving and insightful book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
History/Memoir/978-0-679-75286-8
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Memoir/978-1-4000-7843-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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